Intentions

Notes by Marcus J. Moore: Intentions, megiapa’s lush and emotionally layered debut album, feels less like a collection of songs and more like a living archive of transformation. Across its warm synths, fluttering basslines, meditative voice notes and spiritual grooves, the Los Angeles-based producer, vocalist and composer maps the uncertain terrain between heartbreak, healing, fear and surrender. The album’s title is genuine. “The record is literally my intentions,” she says. “It’s a representation of my intentions, my dreams over the last five years or so.” Those years carried the weight of upheaval: the pandemic, the collapse of a long-term relationship, a move away from Chicago, and the disorientation that follows when the structure of your life suddenly disappears beneath you. But Intentions never sounds defeated. Instead, it radiates the quiet confidence of someone learning to trust herself in real time. That trust is embedded in the music’s very construction. Before this album, megiapa largely worked alone, making instrumentals in solitude, creating loops and fragments for herself without much thought toward public consumption. “These were just beats that I made for myself,” she explains. “It was my personal thing.” During the pandemic, she gained attention for her diddies series — brief, playful sketches often completed in a single evening. While those tracks carried an improvisatory charm, Intentions represents something deeper: patience. “What if I spend time with my music?” she remembers asking herself. The earliest pieces on Intentions date back to 2020 and 2021, but the album gradually evolved into something larger than its creator initially imagined. A grant from the city of Chicago helped push the project toward completion during one of the most unstable periods of her life. “I made a difficult decision that completely changed the stability I knew,” she says. “And so the record really is a representation of me returning to myself and gathering all these ideas and desires into one final offering.” That sense of accumulation defines the album’s beauty, as it feels handmade in the truest sense: every synth patch, vocal harmony and drum pattern carries the residue of lived experience. As a result, the collaborators surrounding megiapa function as witnesses to her becoming. Bassist The Growth Eternal and keyboardist Ahmad Muhammad (also known as Kafari) help ground the music in a deep-pocketed warmth, while drummer Mekala Session gives several tracks their stormy propulsion. Elsewhere, contributions from Blvck Spvde, Aankha Neal, Telemakus, Aisha Mars and 10.4 ROG add texture to songs already rich with feeling. For megiapa, creative partnership became part of the lesson. “Do I continue to take up space on this track,” she recalls asking herself, “or do I allow the piano to shine through?” Learning when to step back and let the music breathe became an act of growth. Right away, “Open Your Eyes,” produced by 10.4 ROG , sets the project’s fervent tone. Floating atop bright keys and an incessant chime, the song invites listeners toward reflection without losing its breezy accessibility. “Everything we need is within us,” she says of the track’s message. “We all reflect each other.” It’s the kind of statement that could sound overly sentimental in less capable hands, but megiapa delivers it with grounded sincerity. Elsewhere, Intentions reveals its bruises more directly. “Can’t Believe” — featuring Resavoir’s Will Miller on EVI, horn and piano — confronts the wreckage of a relationship with startling honesty, pairing Roland 808-inspired drums with aching reflections about longing for something that ultimately could not survive. “I can’t believe what I wanted,” she sings at the song’s center. Yet even here, the album isn’t bitter. The pain becomes a nudge to strive higher. That tension between disquiet and faith reaches its apex on “Crashing Down,” one of the album’s most resonant moments. Written during a Mexico retreat amid the chaos of the pandemic, the song emerged almost like a mantra. When she later revisited the song during periods of upheaval, the lyrics sounded like a prophecy. Intentions is also deeply informed by Black spiritual thought and cosmic possibility. Tracks like “(_(_on_the_spaceway_)_)” and “on the spaceway (frfr)” channel the liberatory philosophies of Sun Ra, imagining expansiveness beyond earthly limitation. “I imagine Black people in this spaceway just enjoying themselves in their full expansiveness,” she explains. In that sense, the album joins a lineage of Black experimental music that treats joy itself as resistance. Though International Anthem may seem like an unexpected home for the project, the partnership makes sense. The label has supported megiapa since her earliest days in Chicago, with figures like Alejandro “King Hippo” Ayala encouraging her long before the wider world caught on. “It’s like putting music out with my family at this point,” she says. By the time Intentions concludes, what remains is the feeling of having accompanied someone through a profound shift. The album asks listeners to relinquish their fear of the unknown. Again and again, megiapa returns to the same guiding principle: trust the process; everything will work out. “Fear is a hindrance to our dreams and our goals and the beauty of life,” she says. “Please dream with me. Please take a moment to reflect. And please be okay with things being uncertain.” On Intentions, this state becomes its own kind of freedom.